It will be apparent from a reading of the specification that the present invention may be advantageously utilized with fluid couplings intended for many different applications. However, the invention is especially useful when applied to a viscous fluid coupling which serves as a drive for the radiator cooling fan of a vehicle engine, and will be described in connection therewith.
Viscous fluid couplings have received wide acceptance in the automobile industry for controlling the amount of torque transmitted to a radiator cooling fan. The most common form of such viscous fluid
couplings is the air temperature response type such as illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,055,473. In certain applications, however, it has become desirable to directly sense the water temperature in the radiator rather than the temperature of the air passing through the radiator. To date, many arrangements have been proposed to accomplish this result. These arrangements, however, have made use of wet and dry plate clutches that are electrically actuated. In each of these arrangements, the advantages achieved through the use of viscous fluid have not been applied. Another disadvantage common to a viscous fluid coupling employing centrifugal pumps is "morning sickness" i.e., the tendency of the viscous fluid to migrate backward through the pump into the operating chamber when the engine is shut down, causing annoying high speed operation of the fan when the engine is next started in the cold condition such as in the morning. The problem of high speed operation of the viscous fluid coupling upon cold start has been partially alleviated by the use of high capacity pumps which quickly pump any fluid which has drained back into the operating chamber when the engine is shut off, into a fluid storage chamber. Although this reduced the duration of the "morning sickness", it has not eliminated it. Additionally, a secondary problem caused by the use of high capacity pumps is that in some modes of fan operation, fluid tends to be pumped into the storage chamber more quickly than it can be communicated back into the operating chamber during normal operation of the clutch. This causes an unpredictable response time and in some cases where the input speed is very high relative to the fan speed, the fan drive may not engage at all.
Recent efforts to overcome the above recited disadvantages of prior approaches have often resulted in overcompensating designs which either operate at higher speed than necessary or in an on-off cycling manner, producing undesirable noise, vibration and energy losses as well as being unduly complex and expensive to manufacture.